Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A person with second thoughts about marriage might make a pun about his/her “encagement†or being “encaged to be married.†The web has a few examples of this pun, though fewer than I would have expected, given the popularity of the marriage entrapment theme. I found more than a dozen web pages, however, on which the substitution does not seem to be the result of a deliberate pun (examples below). Is “encage†perhaps an eggcorn for some speakers of English? “Gage†(=pledge, promise) is no longer in the vocabulary of most speakers of English, so active minds might search for an alternative. If “cage†has become a substitute for “gage†in “engaged†and its cognates, I’m guessing the speakers are not importing the more negative connotations of “cage†(imprisonment, involuntary confinement); instead, the “cage†lexeme may carry the sense of being secure inside of, enveloped by, protected within a marriage agreement.
Five examples:
Description of a play: “Duncan – Male in his 40s. He’s the local minister and is encaged to Meg. He is fussy and set in his ways.†(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LTA_Auditions/message/213)
Question posed on advice web site: “My son was encaged to marry, but died. she was pregnant with my son’s baby.†(http://www.webanswers.com/custody/visit … hts-58d914)
Net bio: “I’m also encaged to a lovely girl and we live together in an apartment here in Iceland. †(http://www.amigaworld.net/aboutus/)
Myspace self description: “im young sexy and awsome, encaged to a beatiful girl who is carrying MY BABY!†(http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu … D=21426640)
East Indian discussion board: “Since the boy was extremely handsome, his parents got him encaged to a girl, prior to his departure, though it was against the practise of the male
members of his family to get married at 25.†()
Post to a marriage traditions site: “Here in Finland we tend to follow the current Western trends…. Encagement is still very fashionable – men actually wear only their encagement ring rather than the wedding ring as in Southern Europe.†(http://dodona.proboards35.com/index.cgi … read=10807)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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This is almost too good—there’s something very warm and fuzzy about about-to-be-marrieds looking forward to imprisonment.
The third example is written by an Icelander, and it may or may not be an example of the eggcorn. In Icelandic, ”[vowel]ng[vowel]” is pronounced /nk/, and as a result Icelanders occasionally have trouble with that complex of sounds when writing and speaking English. (By the same token, English speakers tend to mangle “nk” and “ng” (which are quite different from each other) in Icelandic.) I guess it’s possible however that the g/k confusion could actually be driving eggcornification for some Icelanders. Hard to say.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-01-06 20:33:27)
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I know what you mean about “too good.” Only some meditation on the examples I found overcame my initial skepticism. Even so, I would tag the thread LCL (low confidence level) if we had a way of labeling these posts.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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